Motherlines by Suzy McKee Charnas Page B

very high but they threw off such intense heat that Alldera felt her lashes and brows curling. Looking back, she saw what it was they were dragging: the carcass of a horse, split open down the belly and spread wide to suffocate the fire with its moisture and weight. Along the path the carcass made, women on foot rushed in again with blankets.
    The smoke gradually thinned, the fire’s roar diminished to a spiteful crackling. Confined within charred boundaries, beaten back from all sides, the flames shrank and spat.
    Alldera’s horse staggered. She turned over her drag rope to another rider and went off slowly with a load of scorched bedding that needed soaking again.
    On her way back with the heavy blankets she saw Nenisi trying to mount a fresh horse, a sidling, rearing mare bridled only with a rope. Alldera hesitated: it was, she knew, something of an insult to help a woman with her horse. But the black woman seemed to be having trouble. Something was wrong with the saddle, and she wound the bridle rope around her wrist to secure it so that she could use both hands on the girth.
    The horse shied and leaped, pulling the woman off her feet, and it tore away over the blackened ground dragging her under its battering hooves.
    Alldera’s howl of anguish was lost in the cries that went up. The fire beaters hurled themselves at the horse, grabbed at the taut rope and were knocked away. Alldera flung down the blankets and galloped after, sobbing, lashing her mount. Her vision was filled by that dark figure jouncing and twisting at full stretch of the one entangled arm.
    She heard a whining sound and saw an arrow strike the runaway on the neck, slowing its wild career. Someone raced in ahead of her from the side and with the flash of a knife parted the horse from its dragging burden.
    Alldera looked down past the heads of the women standing gathered there. The blackened shape left lying wound in rope was not Nenisi. This was a Calpaper woman, long-limbed like the Conors, dark-skinned and frizzy-haired, made black by soot and now blacker still with char from the burnt stubble over which she had been dragged. The ropes trailing around the sprawled legs were not ropes. They were guts, torn out by the pony’s hooves.
    The raw, ugly underside of things again. It could have been Nenisi; she had imagined this corpse was Nenisi, she had nearly burst with terror for Nenisi. Now she burned with resentment, as if her love had been offered all along to a false image – to matchless Nenisi, revealed today as a hard and bloody-handed slaughterer.
    Alldera brooded on this often in the weeks that followed, tormented by her sense of having been betrayed. Brutality she had known in the Holdfast; in that life she had been cruel herself by necessity. Here she had thought herself free of that necessity, because she had not seen cruelty among the women.
    Now to find brutality in the person she respected most horrified her and made her feel cheated – cheated of the free, clean life she thought she had found.
    She had wanted the women to be perfect, and they were not.
     
    She watched Nenisi take chewed food from her own mouth and poke it between the child’s lips. Almost too large to carry now for any length of time, the child still nursed but had begun to accept solids. It had been Alldera’s own head against that dark, smooth breast once – in her healing sleep when the women had fed her and through her fed her unborn baby. The thought gave her feelings too complicated to unravel, sweet and sour at the same time like everything here.
    She studied Nenisi’s face, freshly scarred pink over the brow. One of the new ransom horses had snapped at her and broken the skin of her forehead as she jerked back out of the way. Alldera’s resentment had faded. Looking at Nenisi, hearing her speak, was what Alldera stayed for these days.
    Barvaran was saying something about the next Gather, and spoke Alldera’s name.
    ‘Not her,’ said Sheel firmly and